Movies have changed a lot since they were invented almost a century ago. Starting out as simple, shaky black and white 15 minute shorts that played in double speed with piano music played in the theater itself for a soundtrack, the industry evolved and grew with incredible speed as people ate it up. Film evolved into the era of sound, real-time speed, and with it into the age of Bogart, Hitchcock and Sinatra. Then, it continued into color and more mature content with directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese putting out groundbreaking film after groundbreaking film. Currently, we're in the age of CGI and astounding special effects. We can do virtually anything that the mind is capable of imagining with film now. It's come from black and white into vibrant color, silence into swelling soundtracks and from men in rubber gorilla costumes into realistic CGI. This evolution took decades, but an evolution which rocketed forward in the last 20 years has been the way that people watch film. I don't mean how they sit down and interpret a film, but rather the way that the film is delivered to the viewer.
Before 1976, if you wanted to watch a movie, you went to the theater, or made sure to watch it on television. This worked just fine for the movie business, studios were raking in the cash and their films were in high demand. Then, a company named JVC in Japan developed the VHS videocassette tape, which would change forever the way people got to watch movies. It launched an entire new concept surrounding movies, one we take for granted today, and that is watching movies at home whenever you wanted. A new and lucrative type of business, the video store, was spawned from this development, and the VCR sold like wildfire. Studios made even more money, and were still happy about it. People could take their movies home for the first time ever, and watch them whenever they wanted to. The VHS tape enjoyed huge success until 1995, when it was phased out by the DVD.
The DVD boasted many significant upgrades over the VHS tape. Better quality of both sound and picture and the ability to skip to scenes, and the smaller design gave it a huge advantage over the bulky VHS tape. DVD versions of movies often had special behind-the-scenes features and subtitles too, and this upgrade eventually completely replaced the VHS tape and the VCR. From there, the disc-format film progressed into Blu-Ray, which boasted even sharper picture and sound, and simply claimed to be better as a whole. And the studios keep making money.
But now, the film medium is starting to move beyond the physical format. Films are now being transferred from disk to computer in a process called ripping. The movie itself is saved to the computer as one long video clip. This method has pros and cons of its own. Usually, ripping results in a decrease in video quality and there are seldom subtitles or special features included with a ripped movie. However, watching a movie this way is as easy as going to where it's stored on your computer and double clicking the icon. It's virtually instantaneous. This format also takes up a tiny amount of physical space. You can store hundreds of movies on the average computer's hard drive this way and accessing them is effortless. And, in the past couple of years, quality of rips has gotten better and better. With an encoding system called x264, Blu-Ray quality can be achieved without a Blu-Ray disc. Now, video ripping isn't something everyone does. In fact, the great majority of people never rip their own DVDs. Instead, they rely on a process called torrenting. In this process, the film is downloaded through the internet by an interconnected system wherein up to thousands of people share a single file. To do this, a .torrent file is downloaded from a host website such thepiratebay.org and then from other computers you "leech" or download the file from "seeders" or fellow downloaders who have already finished downloading that particular file and are now reuploading it bit by bit. The more people that seed a file, the quicker it downloads for everyone else. This is where the studios stop making money. You know all those FBI warnings at the beginning of DVDs? Well, this is one of the things that they're talking about. But, it's become too big to possibly shut down now, and people are only getting more enthusiastic about it.
The biggest drawback to getting your movies this way is that it can take hours to download the file, especially if seeds are sparse. As we know, we live in a culture where instant is best, and thus we have Netflix. Netflix boasts one of the most efficient and flexible ways to watch movies ever. In a nutshell, Netflix gives you unlimited watching time from it's extensive database of films and TV shows for about 8 bucks a month. It takes seconds to choose your movie and begin watching it. You can use Netflix on a computer, on an Xbox 360, on a Playstation 3, on a Wii, and on many other devices as well. The only real con to Netflix is that if you have a slow internet connection, you'll experience problems with quality and smooth video playback.
So, to say the least, the medium in which film is presented has changed a great, great deal. And it's going to keep evolving, too. At some point in the next twenty years, maybe we'll come up with a way to instantly watch movies in perfect quality with no hitches or problems in playback. Maybe we'll make the perfect Netflix. The whole industry has come forward by leaps and bounds. Who knows where it'll go next?
